Hi Karl,
On Aug 13, 2007, at 12:23 AM, Karl Dubost wrote:
>
> Then I would like to know if you are *against the migration* for
> ESW (which is a public wiki.) and why are you against the
> migration. I guess the Semantic Web community will have to be asked
> too.
> If you agree with the migration, no need to reply.
I imagine some significant work has gone into this plan to migrate to
MediaWiki. I have to say that I am disappointed to hear that. I've
been frustrated with the wiki's capabilities. However, I have a lot
of experience with MediaWiki and it is only marginally better. Two
advantages I can think of is that 1) It may be more familiar to
users; and 2) it automatically generates a table of contents for each
page.
However, both the current wiki software and MediaWiki do not really
support much in the way of semantic markup. Anyone familiar with wiki
markup was probably first familiar with HTML markup. If the migration
was easy and costless, I'd say go ahead and migrate. But since it
involves losing history and probably significant behind-the-scenes
work to make it happen, I would say W3C should aim higher than
MediaWiki.
I'm not all that familiar with the other wiki software (and maybe the
selection out there is just abysmal), but ideally the W3C wiki would:
1) support the complete HTML 4.01 strict vocabulary
2) provide an option to edit with a GUI/visual in-browser editor
(with accessibility hooks)
3) produce rich semantic markup
Perhaps these things are already possible with MediaWiki, but in my
experience they are not. Perhaps there aren't any choices that match
those criteria. If either of those are the case, then I'd be fine
with migration. I just hope a thorough search was performed to find a
wiki suitable for W3C.
Take care,
Rob